I’m looking for some recommendations to improve my homelab. But first a bit of history to explain where I’m at and where I’m going. I currently have a super old Odroid C2 and a Raspberry Pi 4B. Everything is working great, but I’m missing two things in this setup: -The ability to transcode -A NAS Now a little bit about me, I’ve been using Linux for more than a decade, so I know how to do stuff, but when it comes to hardware, I have close to zero knowledge… So I was a bit surprised when I plugged 2 external HDDs on my rpi and it shutdown them after a few minutes. I found out that it was a power supply issue, so I did the first thing that came to my mind at this time: I bought another HDD with external power supply, to then find out that having a self powered and an external powered HDD would still fail (although it took longer).
So now I know my mistakes, I should have gone with a NAS instead. I checked the Synology NAS and found out NAS are actually quite expensive. I’m looking for at least 4 bays. I’ve been looking at some DIY NAS, but I’m a bit lost. I found some builds using a Jonsbo N2 that seems cool but at the same time I’m reading the fans are always running at full speed and I’m afraid that the power consumption will skyrocket.
So to sum up, I would like to have a NAS, ideally that can transcode and is low power. In the beginning, I wanted to have a NAS and a mini-PC that can transcode to replace my Odroid C2. But it seems the NAS are far more expensive than the mini PC. What are the recommendations here?
-Synology (Can it transcode?)
-A DIY (Jonsbo with an ITX board that can transcode)
-A DIY (Jonsbo with an ITX board just powerful enough for a NAS) + a mini PC
-Something else?
My budget was 500€, but it seems I won’t be able to do much below 700€
DIY NAS all the way. I had a QNAP that had a known manufacturing defect in the Intel CPU and QNAP refused to provide any support or repair options despite knowing about the issue for a long time. I will never again bow down to silly corporate shenanigans when it comes to my data.
My DIY NAS is a bit...unconventional and definitely doesn't fit in your budget requirement, but I'll leave the parts list as an interesting thought experiment: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Lm92Kp
...okay, look, I know its a bit crazy. No, its A LOT crazy. But I genuinely feel like it isn't worth dealing with HDDs anymore when it comes to building a NAS. Back when I was using the QNAP, I had to replace each HDD at least twice and I spent $90-$100 bucks per drive. A NVMe SSD can easily outlast two or 3 HDD drives and you can get the MSI Spatiums on sale for $180, so in the long-term the costs even out. But the speed at which an NVMe array performs during scrubs and rebuilds blows a regular HDD array out of the water. Yes, its a higher up front cost, but an immensely better experience and the costs even out in the long run. Plus, a PCIe bifurcation expansion card is a hell of a lot smaller than 4 HDD drives, so it opens up your case selection for more compact builds.
I got the NZXT H1 because it was easy to build, came with cooler and PSU and just made things simple. It also goes on sale for around $180. You can definitely go with something else entirely. My thought process was that if I ever wanted a compact PC, I could possibly repurpose this case. This is just for me, it is not a hard recommendation.
I picked Ryzen 5600G because it was relatively cheap, decently powerful, and has HW h265 and h264 decode and H264 encode, which is basically what you need for Jellyfin or Plex. Just be aware that it only supports up to x4x4x8 PCIe bifurcation, so if you do go with a NVMe expansion slot, you can only put 3 on there and will have to use a mobo slot for the 4th. That's how mine is currently setup and it works great.
Yeah, its crazy, and I am sure some people here will scoff at the build, but after using it for 3 years, I just can't go back to regular HDD performance. An NVMe array just makes all of the services you host fly.
What os did you go for?
I went with Arch Linux, mostly because I am the most familiar with it, how barebones I can make it, and how rolling updates are generally easier for me to deal with than large break-the-world distro upgrades. All my services are running in Podman containers so they're completely isolated from any library versioning issues.
Thanks, as I said I’m bad with hardware, so I need to lookup what NVMe SSD actually are.
Can you tell me about the power consumption you get from your setup?
It idles anywhere from 28-33W, but when its doing heavy processing it spikes up to the full power consumption of the CPU (max I've seen is like 120W according to my UPS). I run it in Balanced performance profile so there's essentially no limiter to the power consumption. I figured I spent all this money on a CPU, I might as well take advantage of its processing power when I need it.
Lately I've been running a 24/7 Palworld server, and that is constantly running at 65%-85% CPU (out of a possible 1200%). My UPS reports 45W.
If Palworld isn't running and someone watches movies off of my Jellyfin, usage is around 40W-50W when doing transcoding, and 35W when doing direct play.
Thanks, 30W while idling and 40W~ while in use seems really fine!
Yep! I was surprised at how power efficient the build was myself. It really pays to go with an APU both because it doesn't go ham with the core count and clocks and also because you don't need an external GPU. As long as you're just doing light to medium loads and not transcoding at maximum speed 24/7, your power usage will be fine.